Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online:

Self-organizing Social Actors Creating Knowledge within Mediated Networks

Gary Shilling

April 26, 2009

Word count: 5916

 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 2

Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online:

Self-organising Social Actors Creating Knowledge within Mediated Networks

Abstract: This paper explores how deliberative democracy is practiced on the

Internet by studying online discourse centred on the protests of the 2010 Olympics in

Vancouver utilizing case study method and critical discourse analysis. Since the

evolution of the Olympic games into the modern era, the event has been an arena for

political and diplomatic struggle. The tensions of staging the Olympics within an urban

centre such as Vancouver were exhibited in the demonstrations and protests and

deliberated online by media and individuals alike. This research sought to measure the

hegemony of a global event such as the Olympics and determine the effectiveness of the

Internet in facilitating deliberative self-organising social actors towards creating

knowledge that serves the public good.

Keywords: 2010 Olympics, public protest, deliberative democracy, Internet

 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 3

Knowledge is essentially a public good, but in the global information free market there is

an antagonism between the creation of social capital and the commodification of

information and knowledge. The goal of the exploration herein was to understand how

the colliding forces of competition and cooperation are socially shaped and

technologically mediated in digital space by engaging in a case study that monitored

online stories around the 2010 Olympic protests in Vancouver, examining the origins

and sharing of these stories, and investigating the dialectic that emerged.

This study was guided by the understanding that participation is an essential

element of democracy, where “participation in the political requires communication as it

is premised on the articulation, expression or contestation of positions” (Siapera, 2007,

p.154). Within this construct of society, critical theory provides an appropriate

framework for examining the power dynamic between capitalism and democracy on the

Internet. It addresses issues in terms of resource distribution and social struggles—

viewing reality in terms of ownership, private property, power, resource control,

exploitation, and domination (Fuchs, 2009).

Underlying these themes, it is understood that social phenomena do not have linear

causes and effects, but are contradictory, open, dynamic, and conceived of in complex

forms (Fuchs, 2009). Critical theory, and by extension critical discourse analysis, is

interested in what society could become, and this inquiry studies the potential for the

Internet to foster positive social change. Within dominant critical theory, the Frankfurt

School sees the increasing corporate control of media reflected in the global convergence

of media industry and technology as an impediment to change, and emancipation

 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 4

through enlightenment. Although the Internet is potentially a break from this

oligarchical trend, corporate colonization of cyberspace can be seen to limit the

Internet's democratic potential. This research sought to assess the hegemony of a global

event such as the Olympics and determine the effectiveness of the Internet in facilitating

deliberative self-organizing social actors towards creating knowledge that challenge

dominant texts. A reductionist approach was taken to minimize the complexity of

online postings, with this analysis focused on a selection of mainstream media and

counter-pubic texts relating to the protests that took place in Vancouver during the 2010

Olympics.

Literature Review

Within what can be termed community computing is the creation of a vast network

of decentralised power for moving and sharing data breaking “codes of behaviour” that

is systematically imposed by mass media (Herman & Chomsky, 1988). The propaganda

model of media industrialists perpetuates the idea that sharing is criminal; while

individuals engaged in a collaborative “gift economy” include the results of social

interactions with other people their personal reasoning. Whether motivated by altruism

or reciprocity, sharing behaviour brings positive outcomes for the individual sharing

and the public commons. Unlike traditional mass media audiences, Internet consumers

are also producers engaging in creative, communicative, community-building content

production. This collaborative way of working resonates with Thoreau’s vision of

humanity, where “participation by everyone is progress toward a true respect for the

individual” (Thoreau, 1849).

Globalization and the Olympics

 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 5

Since the evolution of the Olympic games into the modern era, the event has been an

arena for political and diplomatic struggle. The 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens,

Greece represented the onset of the New Olympic Era, as documented in photographs of

the opening ceremonies, the celebrity of the athletes, and the excitement among the

fourteen nations and 241 participants. Colonialism was challenged as athletes

participating under the banners of France, England, and (Austria-)Hungary struggled to

be identified as representatives of nationalities not on the programme (Trbic, 2008).

Fast-forward to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin—the stage was set for the

glorification of the new ubermench (superman)—and a new totalitarianism was

paraded on the world stage (Trbic, 2008):

Nazism was visual, and physical theatre, everything from the massive wooden eagle

at Nuremberg, the gleaming limestone and the polished surfaces, to the rock star

features of its great Charismatic, and the pageantry and cathedrals of light. The 1936

Olympics were fully in this tradition, a great Nazis set piece arising out of the

gullibility of the International Olympic Committee” (O'Shaughnessy, 2009, p. 68).

News media became entrenched in the presentation of the games with Leni Riefenstahl's

documentary Olympia (1938), a mainstay in propaganda filmmaking. Exploring the

Nazi ideal of the perfect human body, the film “conforms to the ideals that led Hitler's

party towards establishing a society based on racial unity, violence, and discrimination"

(O'Shaughnessy, 2009, p. 83).

In analyzing the protest activities at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Neilson (2002)

described the activities of the protestors as "unAustralian". His usage of the term was

meant as positive. Neilson viewed the protest action as a "performance of citizenship

that exceeds national boundaries" (p. 23). He used the term as a counterpoint to the
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 6

nationalistic populism embodied in the "most incessant celebration of national sports

culture". Riggs, Eastman, and Golobic (1993) direct our attention to Espy and his

hypothesis that it is the "essential neutrality" of sport that is the key ingredient for

making it a foreign policy tool. The attention, the passion, and the controversy make the

sports spectacle a suitable instrument for nationalistic focus. The Olympics "‘involve a

basic tension between the impulses towards nationalism and globalism, and it is never

obvious which will dominate" (Wilson cited in Neilson, 2002, p.17).

The Public Good

Critical theory “aims at the establishment of a cooperative, participatory society and

asks ‘basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good’” (Murdock & Golding

as cited in Fuchs, 2009, p. 71). The different branches of Marxist media and cultural

theory are united in their focus on critique and the negation of capitalism and

domination. By speaking through the media, and standardizing the public conversation,

national media reach every individual in their home creating an isolated virtual mob

with no actual power to do anything (p. 102). The result is a worker transformed into

consumer. And so, instead of co-operating and creating value for our communities, we

compete to help corporations extract value from our communities (p. 182). The Internet

challenges this power dynamic created by the oligarchs of media by facilitating massive

collaboration with the net result being “not only a counter-hegemonic move but a

serious, hard-to-stop mass captivity” (Hughes & Lang K.R., 2003, p. 169). Within this

dynamic association of community members, there is an a sense of interactive problem

solving, evolving and a building of the collective (Lowey, 1991). Just as production and

the creation of cultural artefacts underwent a transformation from pastoral hand-made

crafts to mass-produced commodities during the Industrial Revolution, the Information

 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 7

Economy shifts the values of production again, where anyone with a computer can

produce media that rivals those created by media industrialists.

Open Systems

Unlike radio and TV before it, the Internet allows us to hold on to the images and

sounds that we view—modify, augment, and share them. Like its predecessors, the

Internet serves as a promoter, a catalyst of cultural formation that provides a cost-

effective way to reach an audience/collaborators, no matter how small a niche that may

be. What joined the first generation of personal computer users was a relationship with

the computer and a shared aesthetic for transparent understanding (Turkle, 1984). The

Internet extended this understanding beyond the personal realm and into the connected

intelligence of a network where "[p]ersonal computers became symbols of hope for a

new populism in which citizens would band together to run information resources and

local government" (p.172).

Open systems of collaborative and peer production challenge the capitalist approach,

resulting in a collision between commodified and non-commodified Internet economies.

As Fuchs (2009) notes: "New media do carry a certain potential for advancing

grassroots socialism, but this potential is antagonistically entangled in the dominant

structures and it is unclear if the capitalist integument can be stripped away" (Fuchs,

2009, p.82). This study looks to determine if new forms of social engagement can

reverse the erosion of social capital and participation noted by Putnam (2000). Closely

related to civic virtue, social capitalists posit that participation is most powerful "when

embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations" (p. 3). As such, the Internet

may be the perfect storm for reviving democracy.

Radical Democracy
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 8

Radical democracy comes in three flavours: deliberative, agnostic, and autonomist;

with deliberative being the most popular. As advocated by Habermas, it centres on the

concept that problems can be resolved through rational argument. "Political community

is therefore based on communicative reason” (Dahlberg & Siapera, 2007, p.8), where

deliberation through clear communicative channels ensures free and equal

participation.

As critical theory proponents, Adorno and Habermas agree that late capitalist

societies, characterized by a “form of objectivity (from Lukás) shapes our interaction

with the environment in a negative way” (Cook, 2004). While Adorno denounces the

effects of economic systems of commodity exchange, Habermas sees the economic and

political system rationality as ensuring material reproduction of society. For Habermas,

problems begin when functionalist rationality extends "into areas of action that resist

being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialised in

cultural transmission" (Habermas, 1987, p.330).

Mainstream deliberative arenas can still leave the most powerless marginalized, with

counter-publics providing a means for alternative voices to deliberate, articulate, and

activate resources to contest dominant discourses. "The result is a radicalized public

sphere conception, radicalized in relation to the deliberative model in that it extends

public sphere theory to include politics associated with voices excluded from

mainstream public spheres" (Dahlberg, 2007, p. 142), providing a place for voices that

may be deemed outside of what is “legitimate deliberation”. As Marus explains,

"Capitalist society is a union of contradictions. It gets freedom through exploitation,

wealth through impoverishment, advances in production through restriction of

consumption. The very structure of capitalism is a dialectical one: every form and
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 9

institution of the economic process begets its determinate negation, and the crisis is the

extreme form in which the contradictions are expressed" (Marus cited in Fuchs, 2008,

p.23).

In Athenian democracy, the exercise of citizenship was central to life in society, and

politics was a preoccupation shared by all. Within their concept of direct democracy, the

practiced principal is that no one is more capable of making judgements in a person's

interest than the person themselves (Grossman, 1995, p.35). The notion of self-

organising democracy is close to Barber's definition of a 'strong democracy' (Fuchs,

2008), "where citizens are engaged at the local and national levels in a variety of

political activities and regard discourse, debate and deliberation as essential conditions

for reaching common ground and arbitrating differences between people in a large

multi-cultural society. In a strong democracy, citizens actually participate in governing

themselves, if not in all matters, all of the time, at least in some matters at least some of

the time” (p. 231). Modern representative democracy adds layers between the governor

and the governed and weakens the connection between the two.

Method

This research on the potential for deliberative democracy on the Internet combined

the case study method with critical discourse analysis to examine online texts posted

during the 2010 Winter Olympic protests. What case study does best is study process,

and that process is the heart of an explanatory method (Stoecker, 1991). As Yin (1994)

suggests, the more one seeks to explain the "how" or "why" of a social phenomenon, the

more case study method will be relevant. These forms of study are not easily separated

from the social context in which they occur, with the suitability of a case study grounded

in the bounded nature of case study, and the flexibility in choosing the data to be
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 10

gathered (Cutler, 2004). This study used qualitative analysis to understand how

messages and conversations that took place on the Internet shaped our understanding

of the Olympics event, public protest, and their social implications.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) rejects the possibility of a "value-free" science, and

sees discourse as part of social structure, produced in social interaction. With a focus on

social problems and political issues, it is by necessity multidisciplinary, exposing "the

ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of

power and dominance in society" (Van Dijk, 2001, p. 353). Society by its very nature is

characteristically discursive—our knowledge of the world (and its ‘truths’) is primarily

derived from discourse. Meaning making depends not only on what is explicit within the

text, but what is implicit. This is partly a matter of understanding, partly a matter of

judgement and evaluation, partly our relationship to an event.

A central concept in most critical work on discourse analysis is power dynamics, and

more specifically, the social power of groups or institutions within society and politics

(van Dijk, 2001). Fairclough (1992) describes the CDA method as a combination of

'micro-analysis' and 'macro-analysis', with the former concerned with the explication of

how participants produce and interpret texts on the basis of their members' resources.

In their interrelationship, the dimension of discursive practice mediates the relationship

between the dimensions of social practice and text, wherein "it is the nature of social

practice that determines the macro-processes of discursive practice, and it is the micro-

processes that shape the text" (p. 86). Fairclough (1992) creates a three-dimensional

social-theoretical sense of discourse, seeing any discursive event "as being

simultaneously a piece of text, and instance of discursive practice, and an instance of

 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 11

social practice" (p. 4). This research strategy is based on interpretation and

understanding, combining ontological and epistemological elements.

Discourses within media propagate texts, images and graphics that promote biased

models of persuasion. These discourses include representations of how things are, and

have been, as well as imaginaries—representations of how things might or could or

should be (Fairclough, 2005). According to Habermas, “Only through their controversial

presentation in the media do such topics reach the larger public and subsequently gain a

place on the ‘public agenda.’” (Habermas, 1996, p.381). The media are both sites of and

stakes in class struggle (Fairclough, 1992) —their power undeniable.

Analysis and Discussion

Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as a singular shared space where

members of that public could contribute to issues of concern. Recognizing the single

public sphere as a physical impossibility, Habermas evolved this idea to reframe the

public sphere as a network of communication for deliberation (Simone, 2008). The

World Wide Web as a public sphere is a place for connected knowledge, and as such, is

messy. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web designed it as “a

permission-free zone" (Weinberger, 2007, p. 189). The Web has no central registry, no

approval process, and no hierarchy. Anyone can post anything they want; and link to

pages, images, graphics, or texts. Within the open communities of the web, physical

displacement and collaborative production necessitate "Connected Knowledge". This

type of intelligence exists within interaction: Knowledge that is grown through

connections between individuals and inference (Downes, 2005).

The industrial revolution produced the steam-powered printing machinery of the

1830s and gave rise to commercial media in the form of the "penny press", altering the
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 12

landscape of how politics were conducted thereafter. The result was the invention of the

idea of "news" (Grossman, 1995) and the attaching of financial gain to its distribution.

The telegraph wire services in the 1840s accelerated this trend and began a process of

decentralizing reportage and local input. In the modern era, newspapers grew more

corporate, and became business properties of press barons, treating news as a

commodity.

While globalization means many things to many people, anti-globalization protesters

rally primarily against the neo-liberal international institutions that have been created

to regulate the globalization process; organizations such as the World Trade

Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the international

world of sports, the Olympics regulate the globalization of sport as the ultimate

transformative spectacle, and “the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in

totally colonising social life" (Debord, 1977, para. 42). For Zizek (2008), globalism is the

new racism, where commodities travel freely but people do not. The result is a

segregation of economic order between those with economic prosperity and those

without.

Protestors at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics focussed on four issues of

disenfranchisement: The marginalization of the homeless in the city; the impact of the

Games on First Nations land without treaty; the appropriation of arts funding in the

province of British Columbia; and the hegemonic practices of the corporate sponsors of

the event. The impact of the Games on personal freedom began in July of 2009, when it

was announced that the Olympic Security Officials were creating “free speech areas” for

the Olympics (2010 Olympic security plans, 2009). And although the head of security

later claimed that protesters would not be required to use these spaces, the authority of
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 13

the Games accelerated with the installation of 900 closed-circuit cameras, the legalized

arrests of homeless people citing that it was “for their safety”, a patrol force of more than

4,500 Canadian soldiers, and an additional 15,500 private security guards (Dvorak,

2010).

In January 0f 2010, the City of Vancouver spent $50,000 (Bader, 2010) and

published “The 2010 Vancouver Residents Guide”, explaining the magnitude of impact

of the games and how “every resident will play a part in its success in some way” (City of

Vancouver, 2010, p.1). Central to the theme was a list of 10 ways to be a good host.

Highlights included: “Learn your venues”, “Be patient on public transit”, “Show off your

language skills”, “Share your love of the city”, and “enjoy yourself” (p. 1). The mandated

nature of behaviour modification clearly dictated the responsibilities of all citizens for

“welcoming the world”.

The Olympics kick-off was a countrywide torch relay funded in part by $25 million

dollars from the Government of Canada (Feds to give $25M, 2010), and supplemented

by sponsorship money from Coca Cola Ltd., and Royal Bank of Canada. On February

12th, 2010, the torch relay was stopped on Commercial Drive in Vancouver, where

marchers chanted “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land” and the torchbearer was

ushered away under police protection (Olympic Torch Blocked by Protestors, 2010).

Protestors in the Downtown East Side (DTES) came with their families and marched

peacefully (Anti Olympic 2010 Protest, 2010). On day three of the Olympics, February

13th, 2010, a protest organized by the “Black Bloc” sought to block access to the opening

day of the games. Black Bloc is described as a tactic for protest rather than a formal

group wherein the common goals are “to provide solidarity in the face of a repressive
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 14

police state and to convey an anarchist critique of whatever is being protested that day”

(Blackbloc faq, 2007).

The Anti-Olympics protest tactics scrutinized story on local independent

publisher The Georgia Straight’s website quotes Mark Leler, director of SFU’s Centre for

Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University, and his evaluation of the protest as “more in

the way of disturbance than it was violence directed against people” (Pablo, 2010, para.

3). Leler sees the protest as setting the stage for a dialogue between what is “respectable

protestors” and disruptive ones. Habermas believes that “only through their

controversial presentation in the media do such topics reach the larger public and

subsequently gain a place on the ‘public agenda’” (Habermas, 1996, p.381). As such,

discerning the line between violence and vandalism frames the discourse that follows.

Leler probes into the dialectic of anarchy versus anarchism. “Anarchy tends to mean

lawlessness, no order,” Leler explains. “Anarchism, though, is a political ideology that

says people do not need an authoritarian state to live in harmony. Anarchists do not say

that the world should simply be chaotic. What they say is that human beings can

actually live together without force” (para. 8). In the final paragraph of the reporter’s

text, Leler describes the field of action defining social practice, as such: “the anarchist

ideal is a time when people—not their leaders—decide for themselves what form of

action they need to fight for their interests” (para. 14). And with that, reader comments

on the story begin.

The media produce the text that initiates the discourse. As Fraser notes, "media

publicity serves to determine what things become political, and hence, worthy of state

and/or public action" (Simone, 2008, p.12), whereas Habermas argues that legitimizing

norms in the context of pluralism can only occur through the process of rational
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 15

argumentation (Barney, 2007). The media text and dialogue that follows is a

heterogeneous intertextual chain of reciprocal posts engaged in asynchronous discourse

combining the two approaches.

Mainstream media present a commoditized perspective of the events. The Wall

Street Journal story on the protests opens with, “Anti-Olympic protests turned violent

here Saturday, as demonstrators smashed windows, overturned newspaper boxes and

spray painted buildings and cars downtown” (Dvorak, 2010, para. 1), equating the

destruction of property with violence. In The Globe and Mail, the black bloc protestors

are described as “thugs from central Canada” (Matas, para. 2, 2010). The Globe and

Mail and The Wall Street Journal are the leading business newspapers in Canada and

the United States respectively and as such are aligned with the priorities of property as

tenets of capitalism, commodities, and consumerism.

Marx, in his analysis of the commodity, asserts the damage that capitalism has

caused to human life. He argued: "No sooner does a sensuous object emerge as a

commodity than “it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness" (Cook, 2004,

p. 39). Commodities become animated, while human life becomes passively subjective.

Marx's concept of "commodity fetishism" is grounded in this inversion of values, where

capitalist society "personifies things and reifies people" (p. 39). Since the introduction of

television in 1952 the Olympic performance and pageantry has been reduced to a fervent

spectacle to fit the medium's niche, while facilitating "nationalistic internationalism" .

Within the spectacle of the Olympics, national pride gets confused with the commodity

fetishism of collecting medals. Canada’s “own the podium” initiative, places winning as

the primary objective of involvement, as stated in the number one goal: “Place first in
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 16

the total medal count at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games”

(http://ownthepodium2010.com/about).

The competition for international domination in medals creates a complex

relationship between the Olympics, national pride, and public protest. Medal tallies

become symbolic of national success and superiority (Riggs, Eastman, & Golobic, 1993).

When the Canadian Press distributed a story entitled Caped Canadians surprise

world with national pride rarely seen (Keller, 2010), news outlets throughout

Canada carried the story. The superhero hooliganism of fandom was interpreted as

national pride, with the reporter recounting the scene, where “one cry prompts another,

sparking a chain reaction of hooting and hollering that rises above fans draped in flags,

with hockey jerseys on their backs and maple leaves temporarily tattooed on their faces”

(para. 2). The dialectic between “hooting sport fans” and “hooded thugs” of protest

plays out in the comments on the online news sites. Threads of conversion spiralled as

the dialogue focussed on publicly unmasking the “cowards” as a form of justice. The

scale of the violence is lost to the denouncement of the Other.

Zizek (2008) believes that the tolerant liberal attitude that prevails today is to

oppose all violence, with the notion of objective violence taking on a new shape with

capitalism. He posits that there is a false sense of urgency in left-liberal humanitarian

discourse on violence and that this urgency is accompanied by a fundamentally anti-

theoretical edge. He proposes that when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic

images of violence, we must learn what causes this violence. "What kind of universe is it

that we inhabit, which can celebrate itself as a society of choice, but in which the only

option available to enforced democratic consensus is blind acting out?"(p. 64). Within

this construct, opposition to the system can only take the shape of anarchistic outburst,
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 17

where the only choice is playing by the rules or self-destructive violence. For two

members of The Raised Fist Collective who participated in the Heart Attack protest

rally, their purpose is clear: “To give capitalism a heart attack, you know, clog the

arteries” (Stimulator, 2010).

Tactical Media producer, protest supporter, and counter-public domain,

Submedia.tv, documented the activities “the mother-fuckin’ resistance” and its effect on

the sub-class in the video series It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel

fine. For a resistor’s view of the Olympic Games, The 5 Cock Rings Died Episode

(Stimulator, 2010), is required viewing. In this episode, the documentation of protest

activities is animated by independent media producers and mashed up on Submedia.tv.

As The Stimulator (our host) points out, “You break a few windows and corporate boot

lickers from the ass crunching corporate media start paying attention” (Stimulator,

2010). Profanity peppers The Stimulator’s dialogue, as he willingly alienates those that

are offended by his language.

Johan Galtung defines violence as "the cause of the difference between the potential

and the actual, between what could have been and what is" (Fuchs, 2008, p.247). Using

this definition, one can draw that political systems of modern society institutionalize

violence in their control of certain groups against the will of others. Even in

representative democracy this may entail controlling the majority through a minority

group. For Zizek (2008), it is not the masked protesters that are the perpetrators of

criminal violence; it is the violence masked within capitalism is the real offender. The

"mad self-enhancing circulation of capital" (p. 10), and its pursuit of profitability is

indifferent towards the affects on social reality. As he describes it, the violence of
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 18

capitalism is no longer attributable to individuals, but becomes "purely 'objective'"(p. 11)

in its systemic and anonymous movement.

Conclusion

The idea of using media as forms of dialogic many-to-many communication to

strengthen democracy was first formulated in Berthold Brecht’s 1932 radio theory,

where every device was envisioned as having a dual-functioning speaker/microphone

enabling an interactive circuit of participation. Fast-forward to 1997, where Jorn Barger

starts a daily log of interesting web links and publishes them a “weblog” (Carvin, 2007).

The idea catches on, and in 2007 there are over 120,000 blogs created every day (Sifry,

2007). A significant attraction to these blogs is the combination of the posting of the

author, and the dialog that ensues in the comments about the post. Due to the potential

anonymity and non-verbal expression in text-based online communication, Habermas’s

claims to validity of truthfulness (correspondence of intention and statements) and

normative rightness (clarification of and agreement on the normative context of

communication) are difficult to achieve (Fuchs, 2008, p.314). Online communication is

easier and shifts into a more expressive and affective mode. Dewey described the public

as a deliberative body that responds to the consequences of actions taken by members of

civil society (Dewey, 1927). To be a citizen, after all, is to be engaged in the practice of

judgement (Barney, 2007) and a part of the democratic tradition through the ages.

In determining the validity of the Internet as a public sphere, we can again turn to

Habermas, who suggests, “regardless of whether or not the media conform to normative

ideals, they still function as a public sphere, albeit a defective one, in the sense that they

operate as ‘a network for communicating information and points of view’” (Habermas

1998, p. 360). Radical democracy is part of a healthy public sphere, advanced through
 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 19

the contestation between dominant and marginalized publics, where deliberation and

articulation explore and extend a range of neo-liberal and reactionary discourses.

Protest during the Olympics can be viewed as an expression of citizenship leveraged

against the inequalities of a social order that glorifies sport at the expense of personal

freedom. In contrast to the capitalist globalization of sport and media and an incessant

celebration of competition and dominance, the Internet nurtures a culture of sharing

that results in the creation of public good. The open deliberation facilitated by media

sites and counter-publics is diametrically opposed to the regulatory nature of the

physical and economic space of the Olympic Games.

As researchers, we are inclined to look at the order of these communications and

their impact to determine the nature of this emerging social sphere. For Barber, "If the

technology is to make a political difference, it is the politics that will first have to

change" (Barber as cited in Dahlberg, 2001, p. 630). Technology can only facilitate

change not create it—and so to understand how democracy can thrive within the

relatively young Internet and access the impact on political process, further situational

research is required to interrogate its practice.

 Deliberating the 2010 Olympic Protests Online Gary Shilling 20

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my critical research buddy Nigel Barker for walks and talks in the rain at

RRU; to Trish Riemer & Helen Simeon for reviewing my first draft; and to April Vannini

for her thoughts during an illuminating tour through the DTES.

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Anti Olympic 2010 Protest, Vancouver, BC.(2010). YouTube. Retrieved from

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Bader, M. (2010, January, 8). Vancouver's $50,000 politeness manual. Retrieved from

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